Global Frictions on Wet Market: Aquatic Aesthetics and Biosecurity Infrastructure

Principle Investigator：I-Yi Hsieh, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University

In response to the rising criticism of Asian wet markets as possible virus reservoir for the zoonosis infections, emergent in the outbreak narrative of Covid-19, anthropologists have written to debunk the wrongful identification of wet markets and wild animal trade in China (Lynteris and Fearnley 2020, Hsieh 2020). Yet calls for reform, or even a ban, of Asian food markets taunted as wet markets—since Singapore differentiated the category of wet market from super market in the 1970s—are advocated by politicians, animal rights activists, scientists and doctors across board, accusing it as a global biosecurity risk (Lin 2020, Maxmen 2021). Without substantial research on this form of food market in Asia, wet markets and associated vendors continue to be stigmatized, as accusations evolve into a conspiracy theory coupled with anti-China rhetoric. This research project is a critical engagement of the global frictions on wet market, focusing on the clashes of the aesthetic and politics of wetness embedded in food market infrastructure (Larkin 2013).

The ethnographic research focuses on the practices of, and the discourses surrounding, wet markets by centering on a case of wet market reform in Taipei: the Shuanglian market, located at the city center. In 2020, facing eviction, the Shuanglian wet market responded the forced relocation with collaborations with community organizers and architects, forming coalition with a conservation campaign of a hundred-year-old waterway and an MRT green park in the community. The aquatic aesthetics centering on wetness connects the historical waterway and the wet market’s collaborative design, challenging the often top-down reform of wet infrastructure in Taiwan—a pattern traceable to the Japanese colonial rule when street markets in the 19 th century was replaced by public indoor markets, driven by colonial hygiene policy. The research further follows the network of produce stretched from the Shuanglian market, into the wholesale market and slaughter houses, providing an urgently needed ethnographic study of wet market infrastructure, its related biosecurity, and the social value of wetness. Analyzing the poetics and politics of wet market infrastructure in the modernist development of vertical city in the postwar Taiwan, this project sheds light on how art intervention and collaborative design provide an alternative form of community curation, by re-defining “community” alongside aquatic aesthetics against the mandate of public wet markets infrastructure being housed in an enclosure compound isolated from its environment—a form inherited from the colonial legacy—which continues to clash with street vendors and now a biosecurity liability. The project incorporates design anthropology to address community-oriented art intervention as key to the reform of wet market infrastructure in Asian global cities.